Data – you have to love it. Especially when Twitter, Facebook and Google visualize it so well. These platforms show us exactly what went on during the Oscars:

There were 16% fewer viewers this year and a shockingly 47% decrease in tweets to just 5.9 million. Perhaps there were less tweetable moments this year (the famous selfie last year sparked an astonishing 3.3 million retweets alone), but Facebook users found even more to chat about this year. Facebook posts and activity grew 129%, reaching 58 million.

Read more and check out a great video showing the Facebook chatter in this Business Insider article

See when movies were discussed on Twitter:

Although there was a dip from last year, there was still plenty of buzz. Twitter created a minute by minute chart of when the nominated films were discussed on Twitter throughout the ceremony:

Google has also released data on search inquiries throughout the ceremony along with some notable facts. The report shows that mobile is still king and people will watch hours upon hours of awards coverage long after the big event, giving brands the opportunity to shine for months after.

What are the best practices for including WOM in marketing mix models?

How do WOM and paid impression compare in their power to drive sales?

Erin will also be participating in Thursday’s Brandwatch event, “TAKE COMMAND OF YOUR DATA: HOW TO STRATEGICALLY USE SOCIAL LISTENING IN BUSINESS” from 10:30am to 12:30 pm also at Highline Stages – EXPLORE, 441 West 14th Street, New York. Erin will be leading the Q&A section on Making Sense of Sentiment. This discussion will focus on evaluating which social insights are perceived as useful, or even credible. Over the past year, a critical eye was cast on the validity and nuances of sentiment analysis, specifically in the social data arena. In the final segment of this event, Erin Tavgac from leading social strategy and analytics company Converseon, aims to clear up some of the confusion surrounding sentiment analysis.

Tweets in Google Search Results

In last week’s post, we shared that promoted tweets will soon be pushed to other platforms and sites, starting with Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. Tweets will also soon be available with Google search, potentially greatly furthering the reach of your 140 characters. Our search team weighs in with the high level pros and cons of this integration:

Pro: Quick and Fresh Brand Messaging – As you tweet news and messages Google will be able to see it instantly. If you link Twitter profile to your website and vice versa these tweets can start appearing on both branded and unbranded search queries. This provides a quick way to bring your message to a very large audience.

Con: Brand Reputation Management – The flipside of having tweets appear in search is that negative messages can appear when a search is conducted for your brand or on unbranded searches. It is important to ensure your brand is tweeting regularly and proactively messaging about any negative press to manage the potential negative exposure.

Pro: Inbound Links and Brand References – Tweets that contain links or references to your brand and/or website helps the ranking of your website as a whole. When twitter was integrated into Google before it was a valuable tool to generate fresh, topically relevant links/mentions to your site.

If you’d like to discuss this further with our search team, please email: info@converseon.com

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75% of Americans now have a Smart Phone

If you’re still carrying around a flip phone, you are in the minority. A recent report shows that smart phone penetration has reached 75% of Americans. Why have we turned “Smart”? The answer – apps. Lots and lots of Apps. Users are downloading and spending more time on apps than ever before. A July 2014 Nielsen study also showed that the time spent on apps was on the rise, with a 31% year over year increase.

Interestingly, but not really surprisingly, out of the hundreds of thousand available, Facebook and Google are dominating the space, accounting for 8 out of the top 10.

With the adaptation of smart phone and countless daily app downloads, some things to keep in mind:

Always think mobile first – for your new website, your social media content, your ad copy…assume your target audience is on their phone

Make sure your app is differentiated and has a unique value prop from all the others in the app store. And like with any social channel or new product, make sure you promote it across other platforms

Facebook Patents Influencer Identification

It makes sense that brands would want to tap into influencers in social media. Whether it’s a teenage Vine celebrity, a well-respected Physician on a medical blog, or a pro-athlete with a million followers, there’s a clear value in having them positively engage with or talk about your brand.

Facebook recently announced a patent for identifying experts and influencers. It seems fairly straight forward – it helps find people whose content is quickly shared by lots of people. But don’t forget that quality > quantity. As with identifying influencers purely based on their number of followers, this method requires additional analysis. What kind of content does the influencer produce? How do they engage with their audience? Do you want your brand affiliated with ALL the content they produce, not just the content relevant to your industry? Until Facebook develops a way to computerize gut checks, we highly recommend some manual checking as part of the influencer identification process.

Decline in New Monthly Active Users

Facebook recently released impressive user growth numbers (hitting a staggering nearly 1.4 billion monthly active users). Unfortunately, Twitter is not having such luck. Without a stream of new potential clients and customers, will advertisers take their spending elsewhere?

Promoted Tweets Go Beyond the Twitter Platform

One way to combat the decline in user growth is to make promoted tweets available outside the Twitter platform. Tweets are already seamlessly integrating into other properties and channels, so why shouldn’t promoted tweets be as well? Soon, promoted tweets will be pushed to Flipboard and Yahoo Japan. This could be a great way to reach and distribute content to audiences outside of Twitter users.

Simplified Promoted Tweet Buying

For a small business, learning the ins and outs of the promoted tweet buying platform and the different targeting options can be a little daunting. Twitter just released a more simplified approach. Small business owners can quickly promote a tweet from their analytics dashboard which will automatically target users that are similar to existing followers.

Verified Accounts at a Low Price of $1

A verified account currently denotes authenticity for brands and celebrities. There are now rumors that anyone can buy the small blue check next to their handle for as low as $1. Certain verified users are already feeling that the coveted verified account is already too easily attained.

Facebook remains on top:

Facebook continues to have the most active monthly users of any social network. Their latest stats show that there are nearly 1.4 billion monthly users, of which over a third access Facebook solely from a mobile device.

What does this mean for you? Despite the long standing rumors that Facebook will soon be dethroned, your audience could very well be growing on this platform. It also acts as a friendly reminder that the need for mobile friendly content continues to rise.

Twitter Releases New Functionalities:

Twitter announced two new functionalities this week, which continue to keep it competitive in the social network space:

- Native video: Users can now capture, edit and share videos up to 30 seconds long directly from the mobile app. The introduction of Vine meant a launch of new social media celebrities, some of which are even paid by brands. What stardom or brand opportunities exist with these longer form videos?

- Group DMs: Users can now have group direct messages with up to 20 followers at a time. Most interestingly, the users don’t need to follow each other, which will put a smile on any PR professional’s face.

LinkedIn continues to prove it’s more than just a place to find a job

When LinkedIn first launched, it was viewed as the “professional Facebook” where companies could post job openings. Then brands realized it was a place to engage with more than just job candidates (who can forget Citi’s Professional Women’s Network or AmEx’s OPEN forum for small business owners?). Now, could it become the world’s biggest blog?

The publishing platform is now available to 230 million members in English speaking countries. This means 230 million people now have the ability to publish longer form content to their profiles and push it out to their networks.

Imagine the number of times LinkedIn will now appear in your search results, driving to 230 million users’ posts.

Facebook, now with Yelp and FourSquare appeal:

Facebook just announced place tips, which strives to show its users “fun, useful and relevant info about the place you’re at”. Once you have the feature turned on, you can see things like photos of your friends or the popular menu items of the restaurant that you’re near.

Although Facebook reps say that there are no advertising or brand tie-ins yet, there are countless opportunities for brands to tap into this feature. Who could resist an instant coupon for the nearby museum or a buy one get one free deal to the late night pizza place after an evening out with your friends.

Snapchat – What will you Discover?

This week Snapchat rolled out Snapchat Discover, which takes a huge step to bringing its audience high quality, editorial content. Think of it as an incredibly easy way to see fresh content from some of the world’s best editorial teams.

Watch this video to get a peek of the new feature:

This feature gives brands yet another way to deliver content. But as with any platform, brands should focus on creating content that brings value and builds a positive relationship with its users.

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Just a few other things of note:

Converseon is featured in new segment on how social analytics are now becoming quantitative and predictive. ‪http://ow.ly/HyOMl

It has happened. Finally. Social intelligence has now been demonstrably proven in multiple studies to be not just qualitative and reactive, but now quantitative and predictive! The impact is nothing short of transformative to market research, insights, business intelligence and more in 2015, as social listening data can – and is – being mainstreamed into operations across enterprises.

How did it happen? The development of new filtering and sentiment technologies (with high recall, precision and custom classifiers) together with more sophisticated modeling and new ways to segment “who” is talking has created the breakthrough as validated in several key studies.

While the power of social listening has been validated, it’s important to note that not all social listening data is the same. Converseon, together with its award winning sister text analytics company, Revealed Context, uses advanced proprietary filtering technologies to provide the precision, recall and relevancy required to power these models. The data can either be supplied by clients or supplied directly by Converseon.

Want to learn more about the social intelligence tipping point and its new applications to brand and business research and intelligence? Feel free to contact us directly at sales@converseon.com

Just a few other things of note:

Converseon featured in new segment on how its social analytics offerings are now becoming predictive. ‪http://ow.ly/HyOMl

From MediaPost: This week’s announcement of the partnership between Analytic Partners, The Keller Fay Group and Converseon Team To Integrate Social, WOM ‪http://bit.ly/1y2A83H

Want to join us in the conversation?

Converseon will be speaking and participating in the following events:

Bill Hunt and Mike Moran are launching the third edition of our best-selling book Search Engine Marketing, Inc. today, and so much has changed since the first edition came out in 2005. Back then, it was a revelation to folks that search marketing might be more about marketing than search–and that return on investment might be more important than optimizing a <title> tag.

Since then, just about everyone has grown to realize that search gives you a way to reach customers that nothing else can–they raise their hand and say “market to me” at their moment of need. And as search has become more and more important in the scheme of things, some people have constantly said that “SEO is dead” just because optimizing title tags doesn’t give you a #1 result anymore.

What’s really happening is that, over time, search engines have become adept at recognizing real quality in content–not just in their organic search results, but in paid results, too. In Mike’s speaking engagements, he loves to ask for a show of hands on how many people never click on paid search results. About half the room usually raise their hands, which is hard to believe, given that about one-quarter of all search clicks are on paid results. What’s happening is that paid search results are becoming so good that people no longer recognize that they are paid–they assume that if it was relevant, that it just couldn’t be an ad.

Organic search results are of much higher quality now too, because the ranking algorithm is not so easily gamed. In addition to the importance of attracting links to your content, you also must pass muster with social communities who share the “good stuff” and with secret panels of human raters who judge your content’s quality. And social media content itself is such a huge part of what people expect to see–we no longer get a sea of blue links on the search results page, the way we did only a few years ago.

Search and social have both combined into larger movements of content marketing and influence marketing, where working across search and social is the only way to succeed. And that makes sense. Yes, you must be found when people are looking for you, but you must always have ways of reaching out with quality content to those who don’t yet know to look.

As he looks back on almost 10 years since Search Engine Marketing, Inc. first debuted, Mike never would have been able to predict the developments that we have seen. Social media consisted of nothing more than blogs, and it often took a month for a change to a web page to show up in the search engines. What we could predict, and did, is that search marketing would always revolve around strategic satisfaction of your customers, not tactical tricks to rank #1. Instead of stuffing your content with keywords, think of it as using your customer’s language. Instead of buying links, try creating and promoting quality content to attract links and social sharing. Instead of chasing the search algorithm, instead focus on your competitive differentiation and provide content that attracts the customers with the problems you can help solve the best.

Yes, many things about search have changed–that’s why we have needed to write two more editions–but some things stay the same. If you focus on helping your customers to solve their problems, your content will attract them and enough of them will stick around to buy from you. That is what search marketing has always been, and always will be.

We love when third party research comes out with meaningful information for the industry. And two recent ones include Converseon.

Gleanster Research, a competitor to Forrester Research and Gartner, just released its latest “FLASH” ranking vendors in four different categories: social engagement, marketing automation, business intelligence and web content management. Gleanster uses a different methodology than the other research firms. They categorize leaders in these segments by “good, better, best” in two areas: Features and Functionality and Overall Value. Some of the firms evaluated include Google, Tweetdeck, Adobe and Oracle.

Converseon, we are pleased to say, scored in the “best value” category in the social media engagement space.

But Gleanster also said something quite true, “No single company provides a complete, end-to-end solution, although several of the world’s largest software companies are currently on a mission to achieve that very goal.” And we agree with this.

This recognition is why Converseon spun off its award winning social technologies into a subsidiary, Revealed Context, several months ago. This allows our consulting services to remain agnostic and provide the right solutions for the right clients for the right results. We believe and embrace the “API economy” where data and intelligence seamlessly flows from application to application. This allows us to help power an ecosystem of partner applications with what some consider the industry’s leading text analytics technology (as measured by precision, recall, relevancy and customization) to allow us to take social intelligence to a new level and ensure it is fully infused across complimentary solutions to provide best in class end-to-end solutions. We’ll be announcing more of these partnerships as we move forward. And we thank Gleanster for the recognition. More detail can be found here.

Social Monitoring Data and Brand Tracking: New Research

In a somewhat related area, the Journal of Marketing Research just published a new article, “Listening In on Social Media: A Joint Model of Sentiment and Venue Format Choice” that utilizes Converseon data to show how social listening data can mirror traditional brand tracking. As the article states:

“In this research, the authors jointly model the sentiment expressed in social media posts and the venue format to which it was posted as two interrelated processes in an effort to provide a measure of underlying brand sentiment. Using social media data from firms in two distinct industries, they allow the content of the post and the underlying sentiment toward the brand to affect both processes. The results show that the inferences marketing researchers obtain from monitoring social media are dependent on where they “listen” and that common approaches that either focus on a single social media venue or ignore differences across venues in aggregated data can lead to misleading brand sentiment metrics. The authors validate the approach by comparing their model-based measure of brand sentiment with performance measures obtained from external data sets (stock prices for both brands and an offline brand-tracking study for one brand). They find that their measure of sentiment serves as a leading indicator of the changes observed in these external data sources and outperforms other social media metrics currently used.”

This is a big deal, especially given the real time nature of social and our ability to “back cast” can provide even deeper, meaningful and actionable insight than traditional methods. We believe survey + social hybrid approaches will be the engine of brand tracking in the future and we were pleased to partner with professors Wendy Moe and David Schweidel on this. For access to the article, visit this link.

On Monday Facebook added a new feature that lets users save content for later. The new feature, called “Save,” lets you flag things like links, places, or music and then come back to them when they have more time. Saved items are personal – they won’t appear to your friends unless you choose to share them.

And if you are a “verified public figure,” Facebook has a new feature just for you and your famous friends, called Mentions. Facebook says Mentions was created for famous people themselves, as opposed to their minders and helpers to facilitate interaction between them and their fans, thus further inserting Facebook into the social conversation.

The emphasis is on posting new messages, photos and videos, instead of reading what your pals have put up.

There is a Mentions tab that’s supposed to make it easy for stars to see what people are saying about them.

According to the company’s second quarter results delivered this week, e. The price of an ad on the social network more than doubled last quarter. The main reason for this is increased competition for Newsfeed placement, as more users access the social network on mobile. Overall ad sales were up 67 percent year over year to $2.6 billion.

Instant.ly Says It Can Tell Brands Which New Products People Will Actually Buy

The company has designed a Shelf Score Index, where each product is assigned a purchase intent score, measured through a platform that a company rep said “gathers in-context insights from consumers about new products as soon as they hit the shelves.”

The opportunity for CPG brands here is testing products in nearly real time as opposed to the more traditional focus group process, which takes several weeks.

The location based network has a completely new look and feel. Additionally, all check-ins will be moved to Foursquare’s new app, Swarm (the company says 75% of its users are using the new app). All your past check-ins, all your friends, all your photos, will be automatically transferred to Swarm.

The main app’s interface will be completely redesigned as well, and the company hints that this will be a highly personalized experience.

Highlights include: the mobile-only platform has amassed 82 million MAUs, user base is predominantly female, skewing young, 13-25. Two-fifths of 18-year-olds in the U.S. use it “multiple times daily” to communicate with family and friends. Snapchat Stories are now getting 1 billion views daily.

Snapchat Launches “Our Story”Snapchat is testing a new group-sharing feature that pulls posts from many users into one large Snapchat Story. The service uses geo-location to identify snaps coming from the same place such as a concert or an event and allows all users snapping from there to share snaps collectively, and publicly, like a shared photo or video album. Snapchat Stories launched a couple of months ago and allow users to share more than one image with their contacts. The new iteration allows to pull in images from un-connected users in the same geographic location.

World Cup Twitter Volume Is Already Bigger Than The 2012 OlympicsTwitter says it has counted more than 300 million tweets about the tournament during its first 15 days. By way of comparison, it counted 160 million tweets during the 16 days of the London Olympics in 2012. The most-tweeted about game was the opener between Brazil and Croatia.
The question remains though, whether all this chatter will prompt non-watchers of the World Cup to tune in.

Larry Page Defends Google +, Talks Android And Multi Screen EngagementIn an interview with Farhad Manjoo, Page stressed the importance Google places on Social and its Google + network and tried dispelling rumors the company is winding down its social network. Page also hinted at Google’s plans for Android and its role in the “multiscreen world” and one where we go from telling computers “to do stuff for us, to where computers can actually do stuff for us.” – Page

FB@WorkRumor has it, the company is building an at-work version of Facebook. It is unclear whether this would be an effort geared towards internal company communications or take more of a LinkedIn approach.

“We are making work more fun and efficient by building an at-work version of Facebook,” the source says. “We will touch code throughout the stack and on all platforms (web, iOS, Android, etc.).” The source, who refers it as “FB@Work”, says the effort is based in London.
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Twitter Is Testing New Ways To RetweetIn order to give users an opportunity to add to discussions, Twitter is experimenting with a new re-tweet option – Retweet with Comment. This feature would replace the latter “quote tweet” option, which today often requires users to truncate the original tweet in order to add their own two cents.